Tuesday, January 27, 2009

What our homeschool looks like.

We read scriptures together every night where everyone in the family takes turn reading. Angel can read through the scriptures at a normal pace with little to no help. Tumbelina can read through the scriptures a bit slowly with only 1-2 helps on the words in each verse. Hugs is working on her sight words like unto, the, this, them, etc, and she is learning some basic phonics.

We do a devotional in the morning where we learn music, memorize different scriptures or poems, and read and write our family history. This is reading and writing in journals.

My kids also play computer games that drill them in spelling and math principals while I am at work.

Angelic right now is reading through The Magic Tree House books as fast as I can supply them to her. She reads through one in the same day I get it for her, sometimes she has read two, so I have turned her onto some of the other classics we own. Since Christmas she has read Robin Hood, The Secret Garden, some other cute little books about cats and at least four magic tree house books, I can hardly keep her supplied.

Tumbelina is playing with reading chapter books. She has read at least 1 Magic Tree house book this month, one pony palls. Mostly she picks up books and reads them for a while and then looses them and forgets about them until she is inspired to read again by watching her older sister.

These are just the things I can measure for someone outside of my home. We have a habit of introducing learning into everything. Shopping at the store, internal economy where the kids earn spend and save money themselves, Car rides, dinner discussions, discussions before or after our reading/ devotional times, Family field trips, and learning activities we do with our homeschooling friends.

We normally take one thing and do it until it becomes a habit or a pattern that is natural and then build from there. It can be very unpredictable how long it takes for us to master each habit. I ordered the K-12 curriculum because I knew I would have less time to do all the research and prep I was doing before. But I failed to take into account how much effort it takes to learn a new pattern, and have it fit into my family, on top of my family adjusting to me working from home. We have now found 2 hours three times a week where we can fit in k-12. Based on my experience thus far I feel we will have the most success with the courses that are able to be taught to all the kids at the same time and require the least amount of preparation from me. For this reason we will be working in Art, History, Science, Music and Spanish.

K-12 added in a VERY wonderful new tool for Advanced Preparation. With this new tool I feel it is more likely for me to start teaching the k-12 core subjects in the future. But it is unpredictable how long it will take for us to start including the core subjects. That is going to take more preparation time from me.